Dilbert Presents Black Character, Gets Dragged
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This week Scott Adams introduced the first Black character in his Dilbert comic strip.
Scott noted the new cast member on Twitter.
Which got this response from The Mary Sue:
Where to even start with this? The fact that Adams thinks waiting thirty-three years to introduce his first Black character could be viewed as anything but an embarrassment for him? Or maybe it’s that the way he chose to promote this strip from his personal account was by tweeting “Let’s see if the world is ready for this” and predicting he would get “cancelled” over it, giving a clear indication that his intention all along was to try to court controversy.
Others were upset that Scott used the introduction to take a shot at the trans population.
“Dilbert” creator [Scott Adams] introduces first black character in 33-year run, introduced solely to hate trans people
But many found humor in the comic strip. Not the gag but that Scott added no shading to Dave resulting in a confusing appearance in many newspapers.
That The Mary Sue item noted above and The Daily Kos were among those taking the veteran cartoonist to task for not realizing what the end product would look like in the print press.
The Daily Kos confused me by offering this assessment of Scott’s talent:
Adams has already proved himself to be the Ted Rall of Al Capps…
I’ll need someone to explain that description to me.
Dilbert © Scott Adams
Anyway Scott was informed before the week began that this week’s Dilbert comic strips were being cancelled by one newspaper chain.
Scott talks about the ban in the first few minutes of his April 29 podcast where he describes the newspaper group as “a substantial newspaper chain” and then as “a chain that owns mostly smaller newspapers.”
(Scott also admits in that podcast that were he offered an attractive price for the Dilbert intellectual property he would have no problem giving it up – though he would never give up his podcast.)
Current Dilbert does not run on GoComics but Andrew McMeel Universal “is responsible” for the Dilbert Facebook page where as of this writing the “Dave” strips have not been uploaded.
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